Catalogue > At random

As a doubled figure inspired by Dolly Parton, the performers are sitting on a box with an inbuilt flatscreen. The screen shows a streaming video of a multiplayer online shooter game. Sitting above the gaming character, the two performers are wearing wedding gowns, wavy-blond long-haired wigs, eccentric makeup and have grotesquely big fake boobs (female monstrosity). They are holding begging bowls in their hands, which are usually used for the collection in churches. Once in a while, they are bleating “My happiness depends on you!” (from Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene”) hauntingly in chorus. In doing so they are starring into the eyes of one visitor each intensely/fury-like/expectantly. While the streaming video points to a potentially nostalgic desire for the Heroic, the two Dolly-figures put heroism as such into question. If the Heroic traditionally claims a singularity by the self-sacrifice of one individual, strong (man) for the sake of an ideology, a (feminist) response to the emphasis on the outstanding hero, would be a reversion to interdependence. Against this backdrop, the sentence “My happiness depends on you” could be seen, positively, as an anti-heroic preaching or, negatively, as voluntary submission. Thus, it hints at the ambivalent relationship between dependency and independency.

Johanna Maj Schmidt completed an MA in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths University of London in 2015. Since 2017, she studies Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (class of Clemens von Wedemeyer) and is writing her PhD as part of a graduate school on rightwing populism about imaginaries of the Heroic in far right internet memes in so called postheroic societies. Her art works have been shown at the 6th Athens Biennale for Contemporary Art, the 3rd NSK Folk Art Biennale in Slovenia and at a Performance & Philosophy Festival at LOFFT Leipzig. Charlotte Ruppert completed a professional training as a management assistant in office communication at the Federal Office of Statistics in Wiesbaden. Afterwards, she decided to study Fine Art at the Art Academy in Offenbach am Main and finished her prediploma in Painting. Since 2017, she continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (class of Helmut Mark). Charlotte's drawings and paintings have been shown at Rosa Stern, Munich and Westpol Airspace, Leipzig. She is a co-founder and artistic director of Hitness Club e.v., an artist-run TV station.